The Dumbest Story Ever Told: On David Brooks

The Social Animal is a deep and public embarrassment, a lumpy hybrid of fable, neuroscience and social engineering.

May 18, 2011

Ever since his days at the University of Chicago, David Brooks has had, as he puts it, a “sidelight.” It’s not stamp collecting or fantasy football or square-dancing. Instead, when he is not occupied by his twice-weekly column in America’s leading newspaper and his talking-head appearances on NPR, PBS and whatever other outlets happen to call, and when he is not tending to a family with three children and all the sociopolitical necessities of Beltway life, the favorite conservative of American liberals is nurturing an interest in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. It’s a pastime he might have been content to pursue at leisure, he tells us in The Social Animal, but “as the years went by, the same thought kept recurring. The people studying the mind and brain are producing amazing insights about who we are, and yet these insights aren’t having a sufficient impact on the wider culture.” His new book is, Brooks adds, an attempt to make sure that we are no longer blind to what the best and brightest scientists of the mind have to say about us.

The Social AnimalThe Hidden Sources of Love, Character,and Achievement. By David Brooks.Buy this book.

It is easy to wish, upon reading The Social Animal, that Brooks had stayed in his basement with his collection of books and scientific journals, occasionally sprinkling anecdotes about the latest amazing neuroscientific finding into his columns and lectures and Beltway chitchat. Not for our sake—after all, the book is no less genial, and no more infuriating, than his day-job commentary—but for his. The Social Animal is a deep and public embarrassment, a lumpy hybrid of fiction and science that fails at both, and so miserably that at least for a moment you feel bad for the guy. Because it is clear that he means every word, that this loose baggy monster, the bastard offspring of Malcolm Gladwell and Kilgore Trout, is a true love child. And when a man, especially one who confesses that he is “naturally bad” at expressing his emotions, and whose previous books have been gentle and geeky self-effacing satire, opens his heart to you; when he writes effusively and earnestly and often of “soulcraft” and “soul mates” and “the neverending interpenetration of souls,” of love and God and the meaning of life; when he lays himself bare like this and it just doesn’t work out—well, you want to avert your eyes and spare him the shame of being seen at less than his best. You want, despite yourself, to throw a warm coat around him and whisper reassurance in his ear.

This response, it turns out, isn’t despite myself at all. It’s exactly how my brain wants me to react—so badly, in fact, that it took a mere 200 to 250 milliseconds to fashion the response. At least that’s what, according to Brooks, the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have discovered. Before I could even think about it, I just felt bad for the guy—a reaction for which I evidently have something called mirror neurons to thank. The brains of primates, Brooks reports, are wired for empathy because they reflexively re-create the goings-on in the brains around us. Pop a peanut in your mouth in front of a macaque monkey, and the monkey’s brain will do the same thing it does when the monkey eats a peanut. Put people into an MRI scanner and feed them some porn, and not only will they get hard or soft, depending on their gender and orientation, but their brains will react as if they themselves are having sex. Show them a chase scene and…well, you get the idea. This wired-in imitative capacity, according to the scientists who have been enthusing about it since it was discovered in monkeys in 1992, is evidently what forces me to imagine another writer’s shame about an ill-advised project as my own, and then to wish away our shared exposure. Mirror neurons, Brooks writes, are “a building block of empathy, and through that emotion, morality.” In turn, morality isn’t the outcome of deliberation, or something we dreamed up to make life less nasty and brutish, or to make ourselves believe that we are better than we really are. It’s a hard-wired reaction in your brain, which is to say in your essence, that makes the “skull line” break down, and mingles your soul with the soul of another.

Our mirror neurons apparently do more than make us cringe in sympathy when a man seems to have disgraced himself. Brooks tells us about a Duke professor who has found that the more a child plays “imitation games” (which presumably activate and strengthen those networks of mirror neurons), the earlier he or she might learn to talk, thus setting the stage for cognitive development. Mirror neurons don’t do this alone. The brain teems with neurons and networks that shape us from behind the scenes. It is primed to recognize patterns, to evaluate emotional stimuli and screen out the negative ones, to decode in an instant the subtleties of nonverbal communication, to pick a potential mate out of the billions of candidates, to give our raw experience emotion and thus meaning, to grasp the sacred—and to do so without our knowing it, and while helping us fool ourselves into thinking that we’re in charge of ourselves. Like the faithful manservant who secretly keeps the rich man from going off the rails, my brain silently organizes my mental life. In a matter of milliseconds, scorn is tempered with mercy and I find myself feeling sympathy and exercising restraint—and thinking that I’m a decent human being because of it. What a piece of work is my brain!

And that is how The Social Animal works. Brooks cobbles together a handful of characters, tells their life stories and then, in frequent, lengthy aperçus, offers neuroscientific explanations of their behavior. Erica is a Latina-Chinese spitfire who escapes from a housing project in a nameless city with heart and chutzpah alone. Harold is the phlegmatic, well-educated son of affluent brainworkers who met on a blind date at Barnes & Noble and went on to become charter members of what Brooks, in one of his classic coinages, calls the Composure Class. Harold and Erica grow up, meet, fall in love, have sex and marry. They start a company or two, succeed and fail and succeed again, make a lot of money, forget to have children, have a flirtation with depression and alcoholism (Harold) and adultery (Erica), retire and, not a moment too soon for this reader, die (Harold). It’s a typical American trajectory, except maybe the part where Erica becomes the campaign manager and then White House deputy chief of staff to a president named Grace who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain recently elected silver-tongued commander in chief. And, in part because the action unfolds in a bizarre timeless present, as if history doesn’t exist, it’s utterly devoid of any convincing drama, melo- or otherwise. But it’s almost unfair to point this out (there my mirror neurons go again!), because Brooks’s purpose in writing fiction is not to offer readers a moving aesthetic experience, or even to entertain them (although his trademark observational skills and satiric tone do prove entertaining in places), but to edify. Erica and Harold’s story is fashioned as an opportunity for Brooks to open his cabinet of curiosities, haul out some amazing insights and dazzle us with claims about the magnificence housed between our ears.

Here’s one. Harold is in second grade. He’s come home from school, his backpack—weighing “slightly less than a Volkswagen”—filled with homework and boyish miscellany. How, wonders his mother, Julia, can she get him to do his schoolwork? She considers abandoning the fight on the grounds that “Harold’s freedom was being crushed by the absurd strictures of civilization,” but knowing that “freedom without structure is its own slavery,” she tries to help. Harold, she has determined, is the “victim of the remnants of his own lantern consciousness, distracted by every stray prompt, unable to regulate his responses.” It may be up to her to help him turn that lantern into a spotlight, but short of the “bribery and cajolery” she tries every night, she doesn’t know how. Or she thinks she doesn’t. Then, “without thinking about it,” she finds herself telling Harold a story about a cross-country trip she had taken with friends after college. As Julia talks, she tidies up the house. Drawn into “the hidden zone of his mother’s life that had existed before his birth,” Harold listens raptly. Soon, “like a miracle,” he is plugging away at his homework.

But it’s not a miracle. Harold’s turnabout has a scientific explanation, Brooks says. “With her story, Julia had triggered something—an implicit memory of what it was like to be calm and in control.” In one fell swoop she had “engaged him in the sort of extended conversation that he was still incapable of performing on his own,” established “secure emotional bonds” that Harold could “fall back upon in the face of stress” and provided “living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that [he could] develop unconscious models” in his head. There’s no one right way to do this—it all depends on your ability to “fall in tune” with your kids’ needs. But this attunement is crucial, as it triggers a “rush of oxytocin,” a hormone that, Brooks tells us, is “nature’s way of weaving people together.” A childhood filled with these rushes will yield a “securely attached” person, and attachment, the scientists say, “correlates reasonably well with how people will do in school, how they will fare in life.”

So, Brooks tells us, Julia was, perhaps unwittingly (the best brains operate smoothly and silently), not just telling Harold a story or discovering another strategy for the homework problem but also handing Harold “the key to a well-lived life”: a well-tempered mind, one trained “to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.” These signals come largely from the unconscious, the seat of our emotions along with our passions and perceptions. The unconscious is the larger part of our mind; indeed, Brooks thinks that cognitive neuroscience constitutes an “intellectual revolution” precisely because it “removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of human behavior.”

As Brooks well knows, Freud, and before him Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, to name but a few, had downplayed the role of the conscious mind in mental life long before people started watching porn in MRI machines. The difference is that whereas those men thought the unconscious was inscrutable and unruly and even dangerous, Brooks’s scientists have not only quantified the disproportion between the conscious and the unconscious—did you know the unconscious has 200,000 times the “processing capacity” of the conscious?—but have also determined that the unconscious is not such a wild thing after all. Far from being Freud’s “dark caverns of repressed sexual urges,” it is “an emotional and an enchanted place.” In it are not merely “primitive vestiges that need to be conquered in order to make wise decisions” but also “the seedbeds of accomplishment.” It doesn’t raven with lust and violence, but “hungers for harmony and connection.” It may misdirect us at times, but if we only understood this “inner soulsphere, where brain matter produces emotion, where love rewires the neurons,” it would be what evolution, and maybe even God, intended the unconscious to be: an Emotional Positioning System that “coats each person, place, or circumstance with an emotion” and “an implied reaction…that helps us navigate our days.”

This is all extremely good news, Brooks says, at least for those of us who have grown up in the shadow of Freud and Darwin and concluded that our timber has been twisted without regard for our happiness, and that much as we might yearn to straighten ourselves out, tragedy is our lot, and all our balms mere comic relief. But it’s bad news too, at least for people who make social policy. The sociopolitical infrastructure they have built, and the programs based upon it, don’t mesh with our neuropsychological infrastructure, which is why their attempts to narrow income inequality, stabilize the economy, spread democracy and reduce political polarization have failed. The people in charge of the liberal state have hitched their EPSes to the wrong star—a crabbed and dour view of human nature—“and they will continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy.” Their unconscious minds may predispose them to wish for justice and equality, Brooks says, but their conscious minds aren’t equipped to fathom human nature. If they want their policies to bear fruit, they must abandon their long-cherished shibboleths and turn to cognitive psychology and neuroscience for guidance.

Brooks is the latest in a long line of writers to try to bridge the distance from science to culture, and from there to politics. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels come to mind, as do Charles Davenport, the first president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, and Ernst Rüdin, his successor at the IFEO helm and a co-founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene. More recently, and less scandalously, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry tried to bring an Americanized version of psychoanalysis to bear on big social questions, while Rollo May and Abraham Maslow proposed to remake the world with their humanistic psychology, as did B.F. Skinner with his behaviorism. Nor is Brooks the first to draft fiction to do the job. “I’m going to walk, stylistically, in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” he announces at the outset of The Social Animal, invoking Rousseau’s Emile. He probably shouldn’t have set the bar quite so high, especially when he could have reasonably compared his book to Skinner’s Walden Two and Aldous Huxley’s Island, novels whose wooden characters, contrived situations and turgid prose are far worse than what one finds in The Social Animal.

These science-minded utopians may disagree wildly with one another about the essence of human nature, and the kind of world best suited to its flourishing, but they all are equally certain that only scientific inquiry (or at least their version of it) can settle the matter. We can crack our own source code, they believe, and once we have deciphered how genes or Oedipal complexes or reinforcement mechanisms inscribe us, we can build a world in which we cannot help being, as Skinner once put it, “automatically good.” Approached this way, the old riddle of modernity—how autonomous selves can be bound together without coercion—will have been solved.

Having used science to determine beyond all doubt what constitutes our “true makeup,” these dreamers then claim that their answer to the question of what the good life is and why it is good is not arbitrary or incomplete or even subject to debate (except by scientists using the scientific method). When Brooks has Erica’s adulterous night with a tycoon turn into a flop (“just motions without any reverberations”), one so awful that forever after the mere idea of adultery “filled her with an intense and unthinking aversion,” he is not suggesting that her remorse reflects the point of view of the author or the character. Rather, her newfound automatic goodness reflects only what social scientists, according to Brooks, already know: in “the debate between On the Road and It’s a Wonderful Life,” there is a clear winner. “People who have one recurrent sexual partner in a year are happier than people who have multiple partners.” Monogamy is how a mind that wants nothing more than “community, connection, and interpenetration” conducts its sex life, which is why Erica’s regret is not mere faith-based guilt, and why this outcome is better than, say, relishing an illicit hookup, feeling moderately guilty for a few weeks and then forgetting about it. Erica’s adultery was a betrayal of “the deepest potential of her own nature,” Brooks says, which is why we should all draw the same lesson from her remorse: monogamy is the social arrangement best suited to our “true makeup.”

* * *

With data, if not God, on his side, Brooks claims certainty for his advocacy of sexual fidelity (presumably as good for gays as it is for straights, which may be why he favors gay marriage) and the other virtues he espouses, which include self-control, wisdom and modesty. But more important, he claims to possess the antidote to a poison he thinks has been coursing through the body politic since at least the middle of the eighteenth century—one that has made it impossible for us moderns to see how we are truly made. Brooks argues (or, more accurately, has Harold explain to Erica in one of many wonkish lectures delivered near the end of the book) that the plague was unleashed when Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and other philosophes of the French Enlightenment, with their “great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth,” prevailed over Britons like Hume, Smith and Burke, and their idea that, as Hume put it, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” The French view that “society and its institutions [are] machines, to be taken apart and reengineered,” triumphed over the British tendency “to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships” that can’t be dissected without destroying “the connections between the things you are studying.” The rest, Brooks says, is history—the disastrous history of well-intentioned efforts by think tanks and policy-makers to improve the world, efforts that are inevitably undermined because they are in thrall to a misplaced faith in the individual’s prerogative to use reason to improve him- or herself.

This confusion explains our current political stalemate. The left and the right, Brooks claims, are equally steeped in French-influenced individualism—the “individualism of the market” (the right) or the “individualism of the moral sphere” (the left). The right wants lower taxes, privatized Social Security, school vouchers; the left wants choices about abortion and euthanasia, religion and family affiliation. Each has had its revolution—“one in the 1960s and one in the 1980s”—and each revolution served society poorly. “No matter who was in power, the prevailing winds had been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom, not in the directions of society, social obligations, and communal bonds.” Both sides made the mistake of assuming “there was a direct relationship between improving material conditions and solving problems.” And by ignoring “matters of character, culture, and morality” both sides failed to grasp the significance of Burke’s reminder that “the senses and imagination”—our points of access to the intersubjective world in which real life happens—“captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them, or to oppose them.”

Burke thought those educated sensibilities would automatically gravitate toward beautiful monarchies rather than the messy democracies favored by the French. But in Brooks’s telling, science is heedless of politics, and “the cognitive revolution of the past thirty years…strongly indicate[s] that the British Enlightenment view of human nature is more accurate than the French” view. The idea of an ultimately unfathomable inner landscape, of ourselves as a mystery that cannot be plumbed and yet must be broached, is the legacy of that disastrous eighteenth-century turn. In real life, as Brooks tells us Alfred North Whitehead once said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” In the grip of individualistic ideology, we’ve lost sight of what it means to be a social animal. We’ve been thinking too hard about our moral lives, about discovering the truth and the good in our deep interior, and all we have to show for it is decadence, political deadlock and disastrous social policies. Now that science has alerted us to the error of our ways, Brooks says, it is time once again to take seriously what Adam Smith understood as the education of our sentiments.

* * *

In The Social Animal, Harold’s education is the handiwork of a Ms. Taylor, an “overwrought” young woman, singer-songwriter by night, high school teacher by day, whose “emotional neediness” and other “sentimental qualities” make her a “superstar” when it comes to teaching kids. She believes she can “look deep into her students’ souls, diagnose their core longing” and devise a syllabus to match it, which in Harold’s case turns out to be classical Greek literature. She forces him to find the relevance of Aeschylus and Herodotus to his present life, even wrests from him a final paper titled “Pericles at the Prom.” Without his knowing it, Ms. Taylor guides Harold “through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious” until he “no longer had to work to apply qualities like thumos to the world around him; they simply became the automatic categories of his mind, the way he perceived new situations.”

Erica’s education occurs in a charter school. She ends up there after bursting into a school board meeting and demanding entry to the academy, behavior that rather than getting her kicked out somehow persuades the school’s benefactor to order his board to rig the lottery in her favor. “Surround a person with a new culture,” Brooks says, and “they will absorb new habits of thought and behaviors.” Sure enough, a few years and intemperate outbursts later, Erica “has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way.” Equipped with an automatic goodness mechanism, she finds that her ruthlessness has been channeled into the right kind of ambition, and she’s off to succeed in the game of life.

What Erica and Harold acquire by accident—an unfailingly accurate EPS—is, Brooks proposes, not unlike the expertise of chess grandmasters: the ability to see the array of pieces on the board as a story. Their sentiments educated, they emerge with “domain expertise,” with the ability to know, without thinking about it, indeed without even knowing that they know, what move to make next.

That this kind of expertise is rarely achieved, and then only by accident, is, according to Brooks, the most tragic burden of the French legacy. It’s not that we don’t act automatically; it’s just that we automatically do the wrong things. That’s why we have a government that can’t decide whether to be a nanny state or an absent father, despite the demands of our neuropsychological makeup for something else entirely: the “limited but energetic” politics proposed by Alexander Hamilton, one that gets involved only insofar as it creates the conditions for our prospering.

The French legacy confounds our political lives in other ways. You may think you are attracted to a candidate or a party out of conviction, because the person or the group reflects the values and beliefs you have cultivated, but according to Brooks, you; have it backward. His scientists have concluded that we generally inherit our party affiliations from our parents or form them in early adulthood. These affiliations then shape our beliefs. “People become Democrats first, then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans first, then place increasing value on limited government.” The problem is not that we lack conviction, or that our convictions are shamelessly manipulated by politicians, corporations and the media, all of which have an equal stake in maintaining the stalemate. The problem is conviction itself. Belief—in our case the belief that we are morally autonomous beings—throws off our EPS, skewing our view of the game board. “People’s perceptions,” Brooks says, “are blatantly biased by partisanship.”

Ideologies: evidently we all have them, and they all stink. Replace them with science, however, and we can’t help creating a culture that will equip us with what comes naturally to Harold and Erica: a magnificent cognitive apparatus, one that can’t help achieving a “wonderfully fulfilling” life for its host.

“We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.” Brooks cites this remark of Immanuel Kant’s very near the end of his book, just before Harold, incapacitated by tendinitis and old age, and sitting on the porch of his house in Aspen, peacefully slips away. It’s a curious coda, given the scientism that pervades The Social Animal—all the facts and figures, all the breathlessly recounted neuroscientific insights about our true makeup (strippers earn 45 percent less in tips when they are menstruating! spouses in a healthy marriage make five positive comments for every negative one!). Brooks no doubt means to complement his earlier allusions to the necessity of “epistemological modesty” and the value of “negative capability” (the capacity to live in a state of uncertainty)—British inventions both. It’s as if by introducing a German philosopher, Brooks thinks he can squeeze the arrogant French from both sides of the map.

Brooks would also say that his call for humility is in keeping with what the scientists know about us: that we are immersed in a dynamic, intersubjective world, one that reason can’t possibly apprehend in its fullness. He is no doubt right about that. But it is hardly modest for him to claim that the composition of those secret springs of action can be known, that they are placid and refreshing, that they flow in an orderly fashion and that they can be harnessed for our use. His confidence in his knowledge echoes the constellation of scientists and thinkers who have, in recent years, turned to the study of happiness. Books like The Politics of Happiness, by Derek Bok, and Flourish, the latest offering by the father of Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman, propose that we use science’s insights into human nature to create a politics that ensures our happiness—a politics that some way or another always ends up resembling some version of late capitalist democracy.

But felicitous as it may seem, this prescription has a problem. In The Social Animal Brooks puts Harold and Erica through their paces: wins and losses, good sex and bad, adultery and alcoholism and depression. Harold, finding himself deep in his cups too often, goes to a few AA meetings, decides to drink less, and then does; he treats his ennui (and his regret at not having had children) by getting involved in a camp for girls—all without actual drunkenness, hangovers, penance, sadness or anything resembling passion. For her part, Erica not only leaves adultery behind with nary a look back; she becomes White House deputy chief of staff without ever having fought a political battle or espoused a single belief. She’s an empty vessel waiting to be filled with Brooks’s political philosophy by way of Harold’s tiresome lectures. But Brooks never shows Harold or Erica struggling or confused or damaged in a way that compels sympathy or engagement. They are endlessly resilient, the shining embodiment of the Composure Class that Brooks thinks is our proper destiny, and to which a culture of scientism makes entry automatic.

This is no mere literary failure, or an indication that Brooks ought to stick to his day job. Nor is it only the predictable downfall of extended allegory. It is also a failure of the imagination, of the sentiments, and therefore of Brooks’s idea of sentimental education. Brooks engineers a new world—how French is that?—and then fills his characters with his sentiments, his gauzy and fervent wishes for a civilization of modest and moderate people untroubled by belief. In that world, it really doesn’t matter that one ideology favors protecting the poor from the rich while another seeks a government that does the opposite. On planet Brooks, all convictions are equally worthless. The good life is a shiny, skull-numbing slither along the surface of things, and the best world is fashioned by wise, scientifically informed leaders. In that world, it is not absurd, let alone obscene, to use Kant’s reflection on the endless uncertainty of our moral lives in the way Brooks does: to comment on Harold’s decision about which brand of car to buy. This is your brain on Brooks: an organ hard-wired to reduce moral decisions to consumer choices.

And therein lies the appeal of this book. Who would not like to believe that we harbor deep within us the inborn ability to grapple successfully, and free of anguish, with the ever-multiplying, seemingly insoluble moral conundrums we face? Those of us who, unlike Brooks, live in a state of negative capability, must be willing to admit that he could be right, that our dourness and doubts about our prospects are mere error, that our sense of the unconscious as irredeemably wild, of human life as inescapably tragic, and of struggle and contradiction and belief as crucial aspects of what makes life worth living could be entirely misguided, or even perverse. On the other hand, if my true moral makeup is such that the decision to buy a Honda or a Ford is no different from the decision to have children or the decision to support a candidate or to protect someone from shame, decisions all arrived at as smoothly as an automatic transmission cycling through the gears; and if the government adopts policies to help me function that way, then, like Ivan Karamazov, I think I’m going to return my ticket.

Brooks wants our leaders to do to us what he has done to Erica and Harold: fill us with a scientifically justified notion of the good life. That vision of the good life is what’s ultimately unforgivable, and frightening, about The Social Animal. Precisely because human nature is malleable, and selves the product of culture, we should be afraid when people with power and influence tell us they know who we are and what is good for us. Scientific theories of human nature aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. They can’t help adopting as universal the passing fancies of a given age—or, in the present case, the fervent hopes of a ruling class whose greed and ambition seem to know no limits, and who, cheered on by their favorite newspaper pundit, would warmly embrace a politics dedicated to making a populace happy in exactly the way Brooks describes. A government devoted to our happiness is a terrifying prospect. I’d settle for a politics, and a political columnist, committed to preventing misery.

Gary GreenbergGary Greenberg, a practicing psychotherapist, is the author of Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease.